Could it be Madness-this?

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 13:36:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 04:41:00 +0000

I Love Me Some Fascism

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:38:00 +0000

Gertrude Käsebier In Europe, 1905 by Frances Benjamin Johnston [LOC]

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 09:02:00 +0000

Gertrude Käsebier (LOC)

Johnston, Frances Benjamin,, 1864-1952,, photographer.

Gertrude Käsebier

[1905]

1 photographic print.

Notes:
Title from item.
Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection.
Photograph shows photographer Gertrude Käsebier, standing next to a tripod-mounted camera, an unidentified man is standing behind the camera.

Subjects:
Käsebier, Gertrude,--1852-1934--Journeys--Europe.
Cameras--1890-1930.
Photography--1890-1930.
Photographers--1890-1930.

Rights Info: No known restrictions on publication.

Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Persistent URL: hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.31769

Call Number: LOT 11733-5b [item]

Optimist

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 21:28:00 +0000

by Nad

Amy Winehouse 1983-2011 Photograph By Andrew Kendall

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 20:22:00 +0000

1983-2011

RIP Amy Jade Winehouse 1983-2011 Photograph: Andrew Kendall

Nearly all of what you will hear about this immense talent is "drink and drugs" the "27 Club" "what a waste" etc. All this does is perpetuate myth and stigma.

While sudden fame can certainly accelerate matters, in thousands of ordinary cases each year,
untreated mental illness = death. It's been a very sad weekend indeed.

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 15:35:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 20:40:00 +0000

Until The Watch Is Taken From The Wrist

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 19:11:00 +0000

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one's life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one's loves and friendships.
Kay Redfield Jamison,
An Unquiet Mind (1995)

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 22:02:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 00:37:00 +0000

123/365. When I was driving across Andalucía

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:50:00 +0000

123/365. When I was driving across Andalucía, Photograph by ixot.

or actually Öland, Sweden.

Coming Out With Mental Illness

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:38:00 +0000

"Across the country, in small towns and cities, hundreds of people with severe mental illness live what appear to be normal, successful lives. They work in demanding jobs. They juggle responsibilities. They pay the bills, study, fall in love, raise families — all while knowing that their secret, if ever exposed, would mean almost certain ruin.
Now, a small number of them are taking that chance, saying that it’s time. The nation’s mental health system is in a shambles, they say, criminalizing many patients and warehousing many others in nursing and group homes where they receive minimal therapy.
Moreover, the enduring stigma of mental illness teaches people with a diagnosis to think of themselves as victims, snuffing out the one thing that can motivate them to find treatment — hope."

Tara Parker-Pope, NYT

See also: Kay Redfield Jamison

Reflections in Time

noreply@blogger.com (Syd) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:20:00 +0000

Click on picture for a larger view

These are windows which let in light but cannot be opened, and doors through which I cannot walk. They are in my mind and lost in time, but they return to me now. My gaze pushes through them and I remember. There are some which I can’t quite see through because they are still in the future, and they are hidden to me.

A day comes that isn’t a day. It’s a thousand days – days passed and days yet to come. Some are clear, and some are hazy. I don’t really know why it happens. Situation and circumstance twist themselves around and come to a moment of clarity when the past, present and even hints of the future become visible at once. It doesn’t last. It’s purely temporary, but for those few hours or days, it is like standing on a ridge with everything ahead and behind in view. The moment is usually accompanied by a fear of trusting the scene unfolding in the mind.

Windows and doors full of light, memory and possibility, separated from me by time, a hundred people and places I’ve been surging across each other like the tide coming in – this is the picture. It is confusing on the surface, but tied together by the internal narrative of a human life. For a few moments, or maybe even an afternoon, the whole story hangs together. For a little while, there is an element of certainty and clear seeing.

It leaves as quickly as it comes. The sacred hologram of non-linear time collapses to a single thin thread – tomorrow morning, the next meal, the next job. The picture remains as a memory, its ambiguous special dimensions spilling across each other in ways that no longer makes sense. At least the memory remains.

The Secret Sauce of a Great Photograph

noreply@blogger.com (Syd) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 14:52:00 +0000

What makes a photograph great? Please notice that I didn’t say “good,” excellent” or any of those cheap superlatives like “stunning.” The question is what makes a great photograph? By “great photograph” I mean that handful of photographs that come to your mind in an instant when you think about the best that photography can be. These are the shots that find their way onto museum walls and are published in anthologies again and again because there is something about them that compels us to look at them, regardless of how many times we may have seen them before. Among those that come to my mind are Steve McCurry’s “Afghan Girl,” Eisenstaedt’s “Kiss,” "Migrant Mother" by Dorothea Lange, the Robert Kennedy assassination photo by Boris Yaro, and I could name many others. I’m listing older photographs only because these have been around long enough that most people have seen them. There are great photographs being made every day.

There are a few things that we can identify that don’t make a great photograph by themselves. Style, by itself, does not make a great photograph. Fashion photographers are great on style. Most of them develop elaborate and distinctive shooting and post-processing techniques that produce a unique style. Many of these are very pretty and interesting, but they are largely forgettable because the photograph is nothing more than yet another pretty girl rendered with an interesting post-processing method – nice, but so what? Technique is another element that does not produce a great photograph by itself. The great Ansel Adams used a large view camera and manually burned and dodged his prints. It’s a great technique with the potential to produce breathtaking photographs, but the greatness does not emerge from a particular technique or even technical excellence. Robert Capa’s immortal D-Day shots are technical disasters, and as I understand it, they required some Herculean darkroom manipulation to get a print, yet they are some of the most powerful images ever made. Beauty is another element that cannot by itself produce a great photograph. I have seen countless gorgeous photographs of flowers and landscapes, but very few of these rise to the level of truly memorable photography because, besides being pleasing to the eye and suitable for framing, there really isn’t much to them. They don’t do much to us when we look at them besides providing a moment’s sensory pleasure.

So what is the “secret sauce” that makes a photograph great? Whenever we speak in generalizations like this, there are sure to be notable exceptions, so don’t jump me because your favorite photograph escapes one of these descriptions. Here are some characteristics that I find common to most great photographs.

A great photograph is evocative.

A great photograph will evoke a response from us, often visceral, usually emotional, and often intellectual. Edward Weston’s famous photograph of a dead pelican in a tidal pool is an interesting example. This photo evokes all sorts of responses, from “Yuck” to “What was he thinking?” to amazement that the fine eye of Weston had found a strange beauty in such an unpleasant scene. It immediately causes us to reflect on the transience of life and the meaning of its end. That’s a lot to accomplish for a photo of a dead bird floating in a puddle. The “Afghan Girl” has the evocative quality. There is something about her eyes that transfixes the viewer. They are frightened, feral, precociously attractive – this shot is disturbing to me at many levels.

A great photograph tells a story.

There is a narrative to most great photographs. With some it is obvious. With Eisenstaedt’s “Kiss” it is, “We won the war, and it’s over.” With the RFK assassination shot, it is, “This great man has been brutally taken from us.” With other photographs, the story is not so obvious or complete, but there is something about them that suggests something important is happening here, and our minds are nudged to try to parse out the story. In Ansel Adam’s “Moonrise, Hernadez, New Mexico,” the story is in the town. This photograph would not be the same had it been just the moon rising over a cow pasture in the west somewhere. The town suggests people and lives which are struggling to survive in this barren place. I’ve been to Hernandez, so perhaps I’m prejudiced, but I know something about the difficult lives in those adobe homes. This photo brings those stories to my awareness. Or take, for example, "Migrant Mother" by Dorothea Lange. The photograph is correctly developed and printed. It has a nice tone curve. The composition is pretty standard for a portrait, except perhaps for the children who turn their faces away from the camera. From a technical point of view, there is nothing particularly noteworthy about the photograph. The story is everything in this photograph: a beautiful woman, her face lined and weathered by worry and exposure to the elements, holding her children close and looking away into the distance to see what new calamity will come down the road to torment her.

A great photograph is visually compelling.

“Visually compelling” is not the same as “pretty” or “technically perfect.” “Compelling” implies that the photograph is so strong visually that it demands our attention and causes us to relate to it by its sheer inherent power. The compelling character of a photo may come from technical excellence and beautiful presentation, such as an Ansel Adams or Edward Weston print, or it may spring from that alchemy of photographer’s eye, subject, and the narrative suggested by the photo. Weston did a close up of a bell pepper that is expertly shot and rendered. He printed it very dark so the pepper looks like a couple of alien life forms locked in an embrace. It’s a fascinating photo. A very different photo which is highly compelling visually is Eisenstaedt’s photo of Joseph Goebbels glaring up at the camera. There is nothing beautiful about the photograph. The glare and the man represented ooze with evil and hatred, the baleful stare made even more starkly dramatic when you know that Eisenstaedt was Jewish. This photograph gets its visual power from the subject and the unconventional composition. Finally, for many, Steve McCurry’s “Afghan Girl” remains one of the most visually compelling photographs of the Twentieth Century. In it, we find technical excellence, inherent beauty and story.

Perhaps Weston, Cartier-Bresson and Eisenstaedt could produce three great photographs before breakfast, but for most of us, it isn’t that way. In my own practical shooting, I’m usually happy if I can consistently get “technically correct” and “interesting.” For most of us, if we produce a handful of photographs that could be called “great” in an entire lifetime, it would be cause for rejoicing. So, don’t beat yourself up if the next few frames out of your camera fail to win a Pulitzer Prize. I think we can improve our odds of producing a great photograph if we ask of it these three questions: Is it evocative? Does it tell a story? Is it visually compelling?

Close Encounters

noreply@blogger.com (Syd) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 16:03:00 +0000

Click on picture for larger view

A kid has a mind meld with an orangutan at the Louisville Zoo. And yes, there is some real sadness in this photo. The great ape just sat at the glass looking into the viewing area in the zoo. Marian said, “He’s at the zoo. He’s watching us.” His eyes were full of intelligence. The scene raised questions in my mind about why one species is behind the glass and another is not. I particularly like the way the boy’s reflection works in the photograph. To me it suggests that we do a better job of seeing ourselves in other species, especially the more intelligent ones like the orangutan.

Photo was done with the Nikon D7000 using the Nikkor 70-300mm VR lens.

Found Early 1960s Kodachrome

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Found Kodachrome c. 1962-66

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 03:48:00 +0000

Widowmaker, or "I Am The Way" 1973

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 20:29:00 +0000

"I Am The Way" Alex Nuckols, 1973

LISTEN:

The Illusion of Permanence

noreply@blogger.com (Syd) — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 07:41:00 +0000

When my first DSLR camera was new, I walked my dogs daily in a park, so it was just easy and convenient to grab the new camera and practice with it as we exercised ourselves and the pups. The park is strung between two low hills with a valley and a small creek running through its center. It’s pretty, but not likely to make anyone’s “top ten” list of scenic destinations. I liked it primarily because it was underused, and I could walk my two German Shepherds in relative peace without running into a lot of other dogs.

There was an excellent feature of the park: it was blessed with a terrific stand of trees. It had all sorts of hardwoods, such as maple, oak, hickory, cherry, walnut, mulberry and poplar. It also had hemlock, cypress and pine. It had lovely flowering trees like crabapple, cherry and locust. Thousands of animals made their home in those branches. It was a tree lover’s dream. I photographed those trees too. I photographed them in every season and time of day, from the blistering heat of summer to the icy dead of winter snow storms. I shot bark, branches, foliage and roots. I shot the exuberant greens of spring and the fiery golds and oranges of autumn. I got a terrific collection of photos of the dogs’ back sides since I always seemed to be behind them as they sniffed for the trails of other animals. I shot a lot of pictures. The photo that forms the masthead of this this blog is one of these.

I began to feel a bit self-conscious about shooting at the park so much. Could I not think of anything else to photograph? The newness wore off of the camera and my photographic forays to the park slowed dramatically. I would still go over there to shoot when I had a new piece of gear to test, but that was all. Perhaps a dozen CD’s contain the archive of this period of near-obsessive tree photography.

Two years ago we were hit with a pair of devastating weather events. The first was when the remnants of Hurricane Ike swept up into the Ohio Valley. We had winds with velocity estimated to be between 80 and 90 miles per hour. Thousands of trees came down. Then, beginning on January 26, 2009 we were hit with a huge ice storm which paralyzed the state for days. You can read more of my reaction to the storms here: Broken Trees. The wind storm was bad, but the ice storm was particularly devastating to the trees, because it broke off the top third of many of the trees completely. The best description I could come up with was that it resembled an area which had suffered an artillery barrage since so many of the trees were cleanly broken off midway down their trunks. Once the ice melted and we could get over to the park to walk again, the damage was heartbreaking. It struck me then that I would never see this park again in the state which I had grown to love. It will be many decades before nature can completely erase the scars and replace the downed titans. My photos are all that remain of the ruined beauty of those woods. I also realized that, far from having photographed too much, I really hadn’t shot enough pictures of those trees, and I wished then that I had continued to shoot them, however repetitive it may have seemed at the time.

We humans have a need to perceive the important aspects of our worlds as permanent. We delight in the new and the novel, but we need security and a sense of permanence. This need leads us to imagine much to be permanent that really isn’t. People, places and things that we love can suddenly be taken away from us. In one stormy night, a familiar landscape can vanish. In this age of ubiquitous digital photography, I am sure that many would say that we are in no danger of being under-photographed. We get photographed for everything everywhere, often without even knowing it. Is there a shortage of images? Most of us would answer that with, “Probably not.” But, if we asked if there is a shortage of images of the people, places and events that are important to us, I suspect the answer would be very different. I don’t have photos of the first time my kids walked or the place I was born. I don’t have a single shot of my high school graduation, or college for that matter. I do have a few of my wedding done by a professional photographer, but they only vaguely line up with my memories of the day. I did document my 30th birthday fairly well. I was hammered the whole time, but I still love the pictures.

As scary as it may be, I believe that we, as photographers, need to approach our mission as if nothing is permanent. We need to lay aside the illusion of permanence and record the people and places in our lives as if our photographs will be the only surviving artifact of something important. Hopefully, this won’t be the reality most of the time. Losing people and places is painful. But when it is the fact, and something important goes away, very few of us will think then that we shot too many pictures.

When Everything Is Ugly…

noreply@blogger.com (Syd) — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 07:40:00 +0000

…Shoot the Ugly. This is a bit of trick, a hook to get your attention, because I don’t think there is ever a situation where everything is completely ugly. Still, it’s easy to get into that frame of mind in the dead of winter when the scenery is bleak and gray. It’s easy to get into that frame of mind in a blighted urban landscape where buildings are abandoned and decrepit, and gray concrete stretches as far as the eye can see. As photographers, we’re faced with a crucial choice: to shoot the scene before our eyes, or wait until the season and the scenery is pretty, according to some idealized notion of the way things ought to look.

Honestly, both forks in the road are valid. Some photographers, through the skillful use of models and studios, or by travel to exotic locations, create alternative realities that bear little resemblance to the everyday world most of us inhabit. Others painstakingly document the worlds they experience with all of the accuracy they can bring to bear. Personally, I identify more with the second group, the photojournalists. I do studio work, but I prefer to be out in the world and documenting what is happening. I have those times when things look bleak and uninteresting to me, and I struggle to find subjects to photograph. So, what are some strategies to get over the “everything is ugly” syndrome?

Immersion

Dive into the ugly. Wallow in it. Find the ugliest thing you can and photograph it. Edward Weston made a photograph of a dead pelican floating in a tidal pool. Most of us would look at the dead bird and say, “Yuck,” but Weston saw the tragic poetry and the composition, and created a strangely compelling photograph from a scene that most of us would call extremely ugly. Scenes such as this often evoke strong feelings and meanings, and while they may not be “pretty” photographs, the can be very powerful and effective.

Recalibrate Your Head

If your idea of a great photo only extends to sun-washed beaches in the Caribbean, but you live in Salinas, Kansas, you have a problem. I’m willing to go on record as saying that there’s a great photo in Salinas, Kansas that is yet to be made, but you won’t see it if you’re looking for the bikini babes on the white sand beach. Instead of searching for something that fits a preconceived idea of a great picture, let the world show you the picture. Look around. What do you find yourself staring at? What scenes evoke feeling and memories in you? These are likely to be the best subjects for your photographs.

Look Again. Look Closer. Then, Step Back.

A point of view is a mission-critical piece of mental equipment. It helps to have one. Zoom in, Zoom out. Walk around. A dud from one POV is a masterpiece from another. Try using a lens with a different focal length from what you usually use. Get high (like altitude) or low and shoot from different angles. Look for subtle colors and interesting textures. Find a different viewpoint from the one you usually shoot. Move your body around across the face of the planet and observe the world as you’re doing it.

Take Your Own Pulse

“Everything is Ugly” is really an attitude rather than an accurate description. I don’t really like winter. I don’t like to be cold. I particularly dislike ice and trying to move around on it. I love green, warmth and the vitality of the growing season – all of those things that disappear in the dim days of winter. So, I tend to cop an attitude about winter, and it’s negative. A negative attitude will color our perceptions strongly, often without us realizing it. The only antidote for a negative attitude is awareness – the proverbial “gut check.” If you’re not seeing pictures, take your emotional “pulse.” Are you carrying a negative attitude about the place, the season, or even yourself as a photographer? Such things can get in the way and prevent us from seeing the pictures that are really there. By bringing these negative attitudes into consciousness, we may not completely get rid of them, but we can make new decisions about them. We can stop them from obscuring our vision.

Vision is so shaped by attitude. We tend to find what we expect to find. If we believe there is nothing out there to photograph, we usually find nothing and confirm that belief. If we take the attitude that there is a photograph out there, but we just haven’t found it yet, we tend to find it. Since I have never found a place where there was absolutely nothing photograph, I tend to take the attitude of “I just haven’t found it yet,” and most of the time, it pays off.

Reminders of Hurricane Frances

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 03:55:00 +0000

Nippon Columbia 78 RPM records, 1957

noreply@blogger.com (****) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 21:34:00 +0000

Now What Was I Doing - Photographic Theory

noreply@blogger.com (Syd) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 05:23:00 +0000

I love the discussions of style and technique among photographers. These debates are endlessly interesting to me. Holga, HDR, Minimalist, Pictorialist, Photojournalism, Bokeh, Abstract, and on and on – they make me think and ask questions that I might not have even considered otherwise. Yet, in our vigorous discussions of style and technique, we often lose sight of the fundamental function of photography, and that is to record. First and foremost, we are striving with our cameras to capture a visual image of the way something looks.

We all hope that something more than simple recording happens when we create an image. We hope that when we create an image, the subject and moment captured will carry meanings which will extend far beyond the instant when the shutter snapped. We hope that the photographer will bring vision and experience to the creation which will reveal layers of meaning and value much deeper than the mere surface appearance of a subject. We hope that those who view the image will bring their own experience and interpretation to the graphic which will give life to the image, extending far beyond the original impulse of the photographer to snap the image.

And yet, when all of the theory and romance of photography is peeled away, photography is a matter of recording how the light falls upon a particular subject in a specific place in a discrete moment in time. Many photographers have taken to calling photographs “captures” which carries the sense grabbing a moment and preserving it, and I like that. When we make a picture, first and foremost, we are recording how something looked at that moment. We are creating an historical record. Style, art, interpretation, layers of meaning, and the rest, come afterwards.

Now, why am I musing on these obvious fundamentals? Earlier this summer, I went driving through southern Indiana and found myself in the picturesque town of Paoli, Indiana. It has a classic 19^th Century county seat layout. The court house sits in the town square, surrounded on all four sides by businesses housed in ancient buildings facing inward toward the court house. In the southwest quadrant of the square was an old building with an intriguing spiral stairway outside the building. I snapped this picture:

The stairway caught my eye first because it was an oddity being on the outside of the building and second, I liked it because of the visual contrast of the spiral stairs against the straight metal box running up the wall beside it. The photo may never make the top ten photographs of the 21^st Century, but I like it. A couple of days ago, I heard on the news that a huge fire had broken out in the square at Paoli. Eventually, images of the devastation filtered out, and I found this:

This is the building that once held my lovely spiral staircase. The building and staircase are gone. Somehow I doubt that they will ever be replaced in the way they were. It hit me that buried in my archive of CD’s and negatives, is a record of how this building looked before it was destroyed. One might question the relative value of preserving a record of an old building in a small country town, but it was a part of my world, enough to trigger me to photograph it, and now it’s gone. In a practical sense, the photos could be useful for insurance claims or for a restoration if one were ever attempted. What’s important to me is that I captured a piece of my world before it disappeared. That’s enough justification for me. I recorded it with my camera.

My earliest and perhaps most powerful photographic influence was LIFE Magazine. My parents subscribed to LIFE and Time all through my childhood. In that powerful, formative time in my life, photography was what you saw in LIFE. If I could produce a photograph that looked like the black & whites in LIFE, I had succeeded. In terms of models, one could do worse than emulate the LIFE photographers: Eisenstaedt, Bourke-White, Steichen, Halsman, Capa, Feininger, Lange and so many more. The LIFE photographers were, for the most part, photojournalists and realists. They brought great artistry to their photography, but job one was coming back with a portrait of Hemingway that looked like Hemingway.

In terms of style, I have to confess that I’m still strongly, probably unconsciously, influenced by this ideal: get a good picture. A good picture means correct exposure, sharp focus, pleasing composition and a smooth tone curve of grays. I never have been a Zone System fanatic, but the closer I can get to filling all eleven zones with a subtle gradation of grays (or color), the happier I am. Overly contrasty pictures still bother me. Underexposed pictures bother me. My idea of a great photograph is still the exquisite portrait of Ernest Hemingway glaring down from the ladder at photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. Eisenstaedt shot on a 6x6 cm Rolleiflex twin lens reflex camera. I’m such a fan of Eisenstaedt that I actually own a TLR 6x6 similar to Eisenstaedt’s. I guess that’s what you would call hero worship because the thing is damned difficult to shoot pictures on.

So, I’m amazed when people deliberately throw their cameras out of focus, use rotted film to get weird colors, or computer software to open up the shadows and suppress highlights (HDR). And make no mistake: I’ll use all of these techniques and I have done some wonderful shots using them. I’m a graphic artist by trade and I am not above manipulating the hell out of a photograph to get what I want for an ad or poster. But, when it really counts, and I’m shooting a picture that’s important, I invariably revert to get a good picture – sharp focus, correct exposure and pleasing composition. I’m a recorder. I want to capture what my eyes see. To me, this is the greatest wonder of the camera: to be able to capture a moment in time as it looked, with the meanings and memories it carries.

My Most Successful Photograph

noreply@blogger.com (Syd) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 05:14:00 +0000

In the world’s terms, this is my most successful photograph. It has been published, reprinted, and sold more prints than any other photo I have done. Back in the day, it was published in several literary magazines; a T-shirt was done of it, and people continue to buy prints of it online. It’s my guitar. It’s a Garcia Grand Concert 1A classical guitar. My father bought it for me when I was in college so I could get a job teaching guitar lessons to pay my way through school. He used a single twenty dollar gold piece to buy it. The instrument accomplished its goal admirably, and I received my B.A. debt free.

It fascinates me that of all of the photos I have done, of people, places and things, that this one continues to experience the the success that it does. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. But it does, and that pleases me, because if I had to pick an image that conveyed what that part of my life was like, I couldn’t do any better than this one.

I wish I had a nickel for every hour I have spent with this guitar. It is still just as wonderful as it ever was, or more so. Guitars get better with time up to a point. Their tone improves with the vibrations that are played through them. There is science to back that up. I’ve read about it but I can’t explain it. It’s just like great old violins. The wood cures and dries, and some parts of it are shaken out by the vibration of the tones. As I understand it, the process continues for about forty years with guitars. Beyond that, the tone doesn’t change very much. This guitar was built in 1972, so it has reached that point of tonal clarity and brilliance so cherished by acoustic guitar players. Its voice is magical. It can still play me into dreams.

The photograph was shot on a Nikon FM with a 50mm lens using Kodak Plus-X Pan film. I developed and printed it in the bathroom. The location was Lexington, Kentucky.

Times change and people change, but good tools don’t change. I don’t play guitar as much as I once did. My interests and priorities have changed, but the guitar is still as wonderful and capable as it ever was. Maybe I’ll find a gifted, young classical player and give it to him or her so its voice will be heard as it should be. Until then, it will keep me company and remind me of a time when music dominated my life.

…and, yes, if you would like to have a print, RedBubble will make you a nice one. Click here.